Canadian Pat. No. 1,008,040 issued on Apr. 5, 1977 describes apparatus for packaging a plurality of pouches of a liquid such as milk in an overbag. The pouches usually contain a quart of milk each and subsequent to the overbagging operation the overbags are sealed and are fed to a loading station. At the loading station the overbags are manually placed in cartons or crates for transport to the dairy.
Recently dairies have invested heavily in rectangular plastic cases for the transport of milk in one, two or three quart cartons. The cases are sized so that a fixed quantity of the milk cartons can be located therein with little or no lost space. The cases are stackable and easily handled both in the dairy and in the retail outlet. With the increase in popularity of the overbag and pouch packaging of milk it becomes desirable to utilize these cases for the packaging of such overbags. It becomes even more desirable to depart from the practice of manually loading the overbags in their transport cartons in view of the extremely high speeds of the pouching equipment (approaching 100 pouches per minute).